A Christian in College

I'm wandering through the halls of academia
I'm navigating my way through the strait and narrow maze

The scripture is sound
but my heart is offbeat
The verses are sensible
but the world is all noise

The path is straight and narrow
but everything around it
from the sky to the seas to each tiny little pebble
to time, space, and gravity
is one giant mess

I hear Uncle Screwtape
he's whispering confusion
he's showing me darkness
he's pointing out into nothing

He's got these books that are so full of wisdom
but there's just so many lies
so much nonsense
I can't tell truth from fiction
These books have hidden treasures
but everything else in them is pointing everywhich way
and no way at all

I run to the Church
and he calls out the hounds
hypocrisy
pride
faction
decency

I flip through the Word
but so much is foreign to me
There's so much that I think I understand
and I'll think it over for an hour
but I'm still unchanged

I get a surge of piety
I pray each day
I read and discern
But at the end of the month
He's back once more
He's got some new trick
and I don't even try to resist

He left me alone at my peak
But now I'm back down in the gutter
back down in the normal
the ninety percent of my life
And to tell you the truth
he really doesn't need that new trick

I know it's a battle
but I can't read my orders
I know I've got the truth
but I can't remember where I left it

It's all up to God
It's all about faith
It's all about the Power
and Love
and Majesty
that made me and remakes me

It's all up to Him
Because I'm in a paper boat
in a paper ocean
And the only way I'm surviving this mess
is with a miracle

Riding the Bus

 Waiting at the bus stop

I might be alone
or there might be someone else sitting on this bench
I get up and pace
back and forth and back and forth...
It might be right on time
but I don't know what right on time is
maybe it's ten minutes after or maybe fifteen or maybe five

It pulls up
I say hello
I take my seat

I've got my ipod on
it's blasting some song
but I want to read or pray or something
I turn it off

But I leave the earbuds in

There's people everywhere
I see some every time I ride
I see them again and again
But I'll never know their names
Some are only in town today
I'll never see them again
for as long as I live

I overhear a conversation
I might be interested
or annoyed
They're talking about their lives
or maybe the news
or maybe some big idea
maybe a really big idea
I might be interested
but probably not

A minute has passed
In that minute I've passed at least two dozen buildings
I have no idea how many people
maybe more than a hundred
So many lives that I just flash by
So many lives condensed into so many minutes of travelling
So many lives condensed into so many blocks and miles of city

So many birthdays
inrpirations
triumphs and defeats
So much pain and pleasure
agony and joy
So much of everything that matters

Wars are fought over this
revolutions
constitutions
charities
research
adventures
quests

Novels are written about this
bestsellers even
poems
plays
holy texts

God made the universe
for this grand drama of little moments
God died in this war of laughs and tears
He rose again to fight
in the battlefield of awkwardness and stiffness and hilarity
of bickering over dinner tables
and cheerful walks
and lonely rides in buses full of people

How can something so impossibly big
be so very small?

I get on and say hello to the driver
I get off and say thank you
And in between all these people
all these souls
skim the surface of my life

When will I understand my part?
When will I grasp the immensity
or the glory
or the tragedy
or the beauty
of this war of little things
that plays out every day
when I go to school?

I want to be Weak

 I want to be weak

My footfalls are too loud
like boulders pounding against the earth
I open my mouth and a new wind pours out into the sky
each word is a captivating song
I close my eyes and the world vanishes

I am far too strong

My dreams are sacred beyond all earthly treasures
My passions are as grand as those of any ancient hero
My every movement resounds like thunder

I am far too strong

But no matter how clever I am
the Enemy is smarter
No matter how fast I am
his angels are faster
No matter how strong I am
His kingdom is stronger

I want to be weak

I will die without weakness

I must be weak enough to hear an infant's murmur
Weak enough to surrender all I treasure
Weak enough to bow to a beggar
Weak enough to grovel and beg
Weak enough to weep

If I am as weak as this
Then I shall never see defeat

If I should prevail against the world
It is not because I am strong or the world is weak
It is because the world is too strong
and it has tried to fight a contest of strength
But I have a King
against whom all weapons are like dust
and all cleverness is foolishness
and all that can die might as well have already withered
and all that can be shaken might as well already be in shambles
and all the treasures of the world are like so much garbage
There is more hope in challenging the ocean to a duel
Than there is in raising a mighty fist against my King

So if the world despairs of all victory against me
It is because the world is too strong
And I am weak

What was the Resurrection?

It was the day the world was born again. Or maybe it was the first day of Creation or the day before Creation. Perhaps it wasn't the day that the world was reborn but rather the day that time caught up with its true beginning. For God made humanity not so that we could love Him but so that He could love us. And what greater love is there than that? Can it possibly be imagined that the Crucifixion was an afterthought? That it was just a way to fix the Fall? Could the Resurrection possibly have been Messiah climbing out of the grave saying "I'm glad that's over with." I submit that this was the true spiritual "big bang", regardless of when the material world emerged. I hold that this was the brilliant flash of light into a lightless world which illuminates all of history and nature and poetry.

It was like an atomic explosion, though that is a puny little thing by comparison, in which the first wave of heat and light and the wave of fleeing godlessness (which is to say, nothingness) can be seen striking the pagan myths with all their dying gods and the poets with their tragedies and romances and sacrifices and the philosophers with their renunciations of the world and the common celebrants with their love of the world. Then there was the second wave that lit up a bush in the deserts of Northern Africa and thrust Jonah into the belly of a whale and then out again and cast the Israelites into exile and then pulled them back to their one true home. Everywhere we look we can find the scattered debris. And then there was the fire, the awful, wonderful, ravenous, gentle fire. It came, I believe to every man and woman that ever lived. It came, and still comes, to those without knowledge who were yet confronted by their forgotten Prince begging in the streets. It came to the singers and writers and philosophers who forgot themselves and their worldly pride in the pursuit of that light that is behind and inside and illuminating the veil of Creation. It came upon people whose nations were still only barely feeling the first wave, people who had no idea of its name, but the fire also came to those who knew precisely what it was called. Its newness came even to those who thought it old and outworn, something to soon be forgotten. It came to those who thought they could bind it up in laws and traditions and lord it over others, and many of these hid their faces in terror and shielded themselves with ignorance. It engulfed those bored of the normality of ceremony and they smiled at the subtleties and laughed delightedly at the symbols. It sought out the wild savages through trained missionaries and included them in a philosophical heritage. It surrounded academic snobs through simple servants and taught them to feast and to fast. It pursued a boy named Clive Staples Lewis with a merciful relentlessness until he bacame a man who went to bed at night listening for the approach of "Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet" and then until his terror and resentment gave way to love.

This day was sunlight upon a leaf. The whole world was infected with the shadows and the hollowness and before that day to touch that which was most heavily infected was to fall further into depravity. But what this Man touched became clean; He reached out into our emptiness and where our hands would have whithered His poured out health and fullness. This same Man passed out of the world through the threshold of death which is available at every point and so at every point was His life-giving touch. We could not concieve of the terror of our depravity so He mourned on our behalf until the weight of our sins bore Him down into the absolute Nothingness... and then He left them there. The One in whose image we had been made and Whom all of us lived as imitations of did what we all must do and what He could not do from His celestial throne, and so we learned how to die. We were incomplete and He poured into us all abundant life. Then He gave us the knowledge and power and hearts to see the crooked things and work to make them straight.

This was a cosmic call to arms. There is a cycle by which sin begets sin which plays out in a thousand different ways in every aspect of life, a rusted chain that is invincible to all inside it. This chain dug into our bodies and built up habits and instinctive depravities. This chain laid the foundation for empires and cities wherein the merchants and bureaucrats and skeptics sat in comfort and safety. This chain delivered a dull and lukewarm world into the diseased hands of the very first to fall. On this day, that chain was broken. It was cut and shattered and pulled apart in a million ways at a billion moments and with it all the palaces of the world were overturned and all the powers of the flesh were undone and those ancient sinners of the first and final war were made to flee from farmers and peasants. The world had been one giant swamp and at the sound of this shofar the mountains rose up to touch the clouds and the waters sank deep enough that whales could swim. Fights and fueds have been born out of simple selfishness but men and women of war have fed upon thicker bread. The wrath and hope and fear and zeal of wars that decimate nations and rouse the muses have been fueled by the power of the Messiah's return. If there had been no Messiah, abolitionism would not have been peopled with his imitators nor would the twentieth century have felt the terror of his German and Russian impostors.

And the truly glorious thing about it all is that it is not just an event or a force that has done all this. It is a person. It is a man who lit up the darkness and breathed life into dullness and set up a place for every kind of person and appointed a time for every natural passion and laid the foundations for the cosmic army called "The Church." And He is doing it still. It is not simply radiance which goes ahead of and behind that day; it is Him. It is He who calls me by name.

Converted Pagans

I find it odd that secularists can so easily ignore the weight of Christianity's theological heritage. In my reading of church history, it seems that nearly all of Christianity's most noted theologicians started out their intellectual careers in cults, the swampland of agnosticism, the cold dark of atheism, or the lukewarm waters of moderated religion. From the Apostle Paul to Augustine to Batolome de las Casas to John Newton to William Wilberforce to Dwight L. Moody to G.K. Chesterton to C.S. Lewis to Philip Yancey* to Francis Collins, the most esteemed ranks of the faiths defenders has been populated by old enemies. How is it then that when history tells us of a miracle and both insanity and natural causes can be dismissed, the critics conclude that it is a lie? How can it be that the Gospels, which are literally thousands of times more reliable than any other ancient texts, are the subjects of greater and more paranoid skepticism than any other ancient texts? How is it that the firmness of Christians in their doctrine is looked upon with suspicion when those same Christians were once Pagans who lost their grip (often very reluctantly) on their anti-Christian doctrines?



* I realize that Philip Yancey was never a secularist or pagan of any kind but he did grow up in a Southern, fundamentalist church that led him to a skepticism of Christianity and the Church and put him on the verge of apostacy.

Easter Sunday

On Easter Sunday, the seeds of Israel that had been so carefully and terribly and tearfully cultivated were thrown to the wind and look how they flourished. Or look back and see how this Rising pierced the thousand pagan myths and tore its way with a flash into the histories and heroics of ancient Israel, this quiet, fierce, brilliant light that flashed throughout all of time and space from an empty tomb.

1 Kings 12-16

In the twelfth chapter of the First Book of Kings, God responds to the sins of Solomon and his son Rehoboam by dividing the tribes of Israel between Rehoboam (who is allowed to keep Judah only because of the righteousness of his grandfather David) and Jeroboam. At this point, God has made a covenant between both of these families; on the one hand there is the pact with David who "had not failed to keep any of the Lord's commands all the days of his life-- except in the case of Uriah the Hittite" (1 Kings 15:5) and on the other there is Jeroboam who had been told by God that his line would be just as blessed as that of David. Since we all know David's name and Jeroboam's name is so unknown it's almost unpronounceable, you can probably guess what happened next.

Since the Temple was in Judah and therefore under the control of David's line, Jeroboam feared that the people's faith would lead to, at the very least, a hegemony of Judah over Israel. In response, Jeroboam built two golden calves and intentionally led his people into a pagan parody of Judaism. This fear may appear understandable from a political perspective but it is really quite absurd when we consider the fact that Jeroboam had been promised precisely the level of power he had risen to beforehand by the prophet Ahijah as well as the fact that when Rehoboam tried to take back Israel through military force this same prophet simply told the soldier that the division of the tribes was God's will and they all went home.

I don't know how accurate the movie is, but there comes a point in Charlie Wilson's War when Joanne Herring tells Charlie that the reason she keeps bringing God into the Afghan War is (in the last resort) because they need Him on their side. This is an attitude that Jeroboam would have done well to adopt.

The story that is told from the beginning of the twelfth chapter to the end of the sixteenth chapter is one of both God's incredible grace and the natural results of sin as well as righteousness. Both Rehoboam and Jeroboam lead their people into paganism but what happens afterward is very different. From the very beginning we have been seeing God's grace shown to Rehoboam and his father Solomon in gratitude to David (as the Bible says, "love covers over a multitude of sins") and we see this continue not only in the wrath against Rehoboam that has been held back but also in the blessings that are to be poured out over his grandson. After Rehoboam died, Judah fell into the hands of his son Abijah whom the Bible says "committed all the sins his father had done before him" (1 Kings 15:3) and the legacy of unfaithfulness continued but God still did not destroy the lineage of David. Instead, after Abijah died his son Asa became king of Judah and in this we see God raising up a faithful servant (though the Bible does not explicitly tell us that God had a hand in Asa's faithfulness, are any of us ever faithful without His strengthening us?) in honor of the covenant He had made with David. Asa led Judah out of paganism and back to the worship of God and 1 Kings 15:13 tells us that "Asa's heart was fully committed to the Lord all his life." 

Compare this with what happened in Israel. After Jeroboam died his son Nadab became king of Israel. Within two years, he and every member of his family were killed. Starting with Nadab, these chapters record six kings of Israel and it is interesting to note how the Bible tells us when each came to power. Nadab came to power "in the second year of Asa king of Judah" (1 Kings 15:25). Baasha came to power in "the third year of Asa king of Judah" (1 Kings 15:33). Elah came to power "in the twenty-sixth year of Asa king of Judah" (1 Kings 16:8). Zimri came to power "in the twenty-seventh year of Asa king of Judah" (1 Kings 16:15). Omri came to power in the same year since Zimri's reign only lasted for seven days. Ahab came to power "in the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah" (1 Kings 16:29). You should have noticed a trend there.

Ultimately what this all comes down to is the faithfulness of David and Asa. Out of this faithfulness we see blessed reign of Asa which was long and peaceful while his ungodly neighbors killed ascended to and descended from power in rapid succession. This is something that I strongly believe would have happened even if God had done absolutely nothing (as he may well have done) except to maintain a relationship of guidance with Asa no different from that any other faithful Jew would have experienced; Asa's reign was the natural consequence of his love for God and the disasters of the kingdom of Israel were the natural consequences of its sin and unfaithfulness. At the same time there is something else happening here very similar to what Christians experience when they give their life to God. We are certainly not saved by works but our decision to accept Jesus is still an act of love and faithfulness and because of that love God's grace passes over all our failings.